By taking advantage of the growing popularity of the Internet, a user can send messages to a receiver located virtually anywhere in the world. There are a number of advantages to sending messages via electronic mail (email) rather than through the U.S. Postal Service. By using email, it may take only seconds for the sender's message to be received by a receiver on the other side of the world. The receiver can read the sender's text immediately on the screen, respond to it right away, save it for later, print it, or quickly forward it to another receiver. Messages a user receives can be organized into convenient electronic folders and saved for as long as the user wishes without taking up office space. Due to these advantages, email has become many people's principal means of communicating with the world.
A further function of electronic mail allows a user to create electronic mailing lists for sending notices to hundreds or even thousands of people at once. Due to the ease of sending electronic mail to a very large number of people, the number of mass mailings for unsolicited advertising has risen dramatically. Unlike advertisements through the U.S. Postal Service, it is not necessarily clear to the user that the message is for advertising purposes until the user opens and reads the message. Thus, the target of the unsolicited electronic commercial message must typically open the message, read a portion of it, then, after determining it to be unwanted "junk", delete it. A user receiving several of these commercial messages can easily expend valuable time, resources and mental aggravation.
Companies and individuals in the business of mass commercial emailing have shown a reluctance to stop their practice or refrain from contacting recipients who do not want to receive promotions. This business, like traditional junk mail, is profitable. Since the cost of sending emails is so low, a junk e-mailer (commonly referred to as a "spammer") benefits by contacting the largest and broadest group of recipients as possible--more recipients means more people who might be interested in the message--even if it also means a larger group of outraged recipients.
Members of the electronic community have tried to create numerous roadblocks to stop spamming--some electronic, some legal, and some with a business focus. Unfortunately, the junk email sending community has generally adapted to and overcome each one.
An attempt to request the advertiser to stop soliciting the user is typically severely hindered since it is common practice for advertisers to either not provide a reply address or to make up a false reply address. Since some email systems (the Internet in particular) do not require a valid reply address nor a valid sender name, most ads can be repeatedly sent to thousands of people without giving the recipients a convenient method to request that they be taken off the advertiser's list. Spammers who do provide valid reply information are often unresponsive to requests to desist. Accordingly, thousands of email users must suffer through a barrage of unwanted email advertisements which typically must be opened in order to determine that it is an (unwanted) advertisement. In lieu of a valid email reply address, some of these unsolicited commercial messages will give a non toll-free number. In order to contact the advertiser, the user must pay for a phone call which may be long distance.
There is currently an attempt to address these issues of unsolicited commercial messages by legislative means. However, since it is relatively simple for an advertiser to access a server virtually anywhere in the world in order to send his unsolicited commercial message to anywhere else in the world, U.S. legislation may have, at best, a limited effect on the problem.
Some users have tried to avoid this problem by posting notices threatening to sue if unsolicited commercial messages are sent to them. However, since most unsolicited commercial messages are sent to thousands of people at a given time, it is quite likely that the advertisers would never see the notice.
Accordingly, what is needed is an effective system and method for filtering unsolicited electronic commercial messages. The present invention addresses such a need.